In Manage Content, you create your Journey SMS. To begin, name your SMS. It is important to choose an easily identifiable name for your own records. Remember, this may not be the only SMS you send within this overall Journey, and you may need to distinguish it from related SMS in your Journey Reports. Recipients of the SMS will not see this name.
SMS Outbound:
Ensure the Enable box is ticked next to Outbound. From the Number dropdown, choose what "From" Name or Number will appear to recipients when they receive your SMS. The options available to you will have been set by your CustomerMinds Account Administrator. Please note: any reference to "dynm" are purely internal, and will not display in your SMS (as verified in the Testing phase of your Journey).
Next, enter the actual text recipients will receive in your SMS. The length of a standard SMS is 160 characters. As you type your message you will see the number of characters still available to you.
Ticking the Allow long SMS box gives you up to 459 characters to write a longer message. However, you will be charged one credit per SMS used (ie. if you use over 160 characters you will be charged the cost of two SMS, and so on).
Please note: You are legally obliged to include an Opt-out as part of your SMS. Use the "Append OptOut Link" toggle as shown in the screenshot above to ensure this Opt Out functionality is included at the end of your SMS.
Tip: SMS does not support all characters. We recommend typing your content directly into the Text Content box. Do not paste the content from a text file like a Microsoft Word or Notepad document. Punctuation marks and other symbols can come in different formats. If the format is not supported by SMS/GSM, it will be highlighted in the Text box. Unsupported characters should be removed or the SMS will not send. Always test your SMS by sending a copy to yourself and your colleagues.
You can also Personalise your message by clicking Insert Field. A dropdown will open showing all the Field headers from the Contact List associated with this Journey. A common choice here would be 'First Name', which would place the recipient's First Name in the Subject line, as shown below:
There are two very important factors to bear in mind when using personalisation in your SMS:
1) Be careful when employing Personalisation, as if there are any gaps in your database, recipients without a First Name entry will receive a blank space where their First Name should be.
2) If using Personalisation in your SMS, for example First Name, then the longest First Name in the database will be taken into consideration and the SMS will minus this from the number of remaining characters for your SMS.
SMS Inbound:
Please contact a member of the W50 support team at support@customerminds.com if you are planning on doing an SMS Inbound or an SMS Outbound with Response Journey.
Now that you have completed your SMS, it is now time to chose which recipients from you Contact List will receive the message. This is achieved through segmentation.
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